Q&A: Brett Long and Winston Hacking on directing Timber Timbre’s Black Water

Ontario folk-rock trio Timber Timbre released the video for Black Water — the second video from their second album, Creep On Creepin’ On, which came out on April 5 — on Tuesday. Timber Timbre’s previous, self-titled album was long-listed for the Polaris Prize, and their brand of eerie folk remains a captivating presence on Creep On. The video for Black Water is both buoyant and haunting, matching singer Taylor Kirk’s low and lilting voice both in tone and in ambience.

The video was directed by Exploding Motor Car, otherwise known as Brett Long and Winston Hacking. We caught up with the Toronto-based duo on Tuesday to talk about how the video was shot and how to turn found objects into sea creatures.

QWhat was the concept for the video?Winston Hacking We talked to Taylor [Kirk] and we wanted to do a video for him and then he said, ‘Make it underwater.’ So we did. I think Brett had an idea kicking around. He wanted to do an underwater video with puppets. … It was going to start off as an animated video and then we realized we didn’t have enough time or resources to make that happen. So we decided to make it puppeteered in slow motion.

QSo how did you go about building everything?Brett Long I guess we just looked around and found old scraps of anything that we really could for, I don’t know, kept things on the lower budget.W.H. We went to Value Village. We usually work with a lot of found objects, so we just found things. Like, the jellyfish are made out of two baby parasols and the crabs are made out of some gardening gloves and papier-mâché. So, a lot of found objects that could function like underwater sea life when filmed in slow motion.B.L. The mask was actually a cracked pot lid that Winston cracked open.W.H. So lots of just finding things around the house and then on the street and what have you, and then turning it into something else.

QHow did you simulate the underwater feel?W.H. We were given a gift from some friends in Japan of this Casio video camera that shoots slow motion. And Brett had this really ingenious idea to flip the camera upside down. And when you flip the camera upside down you kind of get the idea, or the effect of weightlessness. So the idea just kind of evolved from there and we realized we could make a lot of things look like they were floating in water when really, they’re just in a black studio space.B.L. Yeah, the camera that we had was just a little consumer pocket camera — I don’t think it’s on the market here in North America yet, but we got out hands on one and it allowed us to shoot at a high frame rate. So it gave us the effect of underwater when we shot it in slow-mo.W.H. The real trick with that, the camera only shoots in a really small resolution, like something smaller than what you would watch on the Internet. So I kind of figured we could take the video and then transfer it to 16-millimetre film, which is kind of something you don’t do any more because people don’t really want to work with film. But we transfered it to film and then we got the film scanned at HD, so we ended up with a final HD movie but it started off on a little tiny consumer camera. That’s why it’s so kind of grainy and manipulated that way.

QIt sounds pretty time-intensive.W.H. Yeah. It took us about two months from start to finish. But I’d say it was a fairly smooth shoot. The hardest thing was actually just molding Taylor’s face because the performer in the video is just a mask, it’s a puppet we had made. So we had to cast his face and it actually took about three tries before we got something that looked like him and could be used as a puppet.

QWhat’s the story in Black Water?B.L. I think it’s a fairly simple story of a guy who’s been underwater for a really long time and the sea creatures surround him and help bring him back to the story.W.H. There’s not usually a lot of time in music videos to tell elaborate narratives, so we kind of, we always try and think of a simple concept that we can wrap in this environment and really sell people on a mood and an environment and that’s probably more what we focus on when we’re working on a music video, is to try and creat something that fits the song and also creates a world that’s believable. And then the narrative can be anything, really.